“Having to keep her own company for the rest of her life is vengeance enough,” he said.
Little imagining.
Eliza, it turned out, had a wicked yen for vengeance, too, which only made Zuzana like her more. She looked so sweet, with those big, beautiful eyes, but she knew how to nurse a grudge. She demurred from wasting a wish on her nemesis, though, who sounded like such a rancid little weenie, until Zuzana persuaded her that a shing—of which they had dozens, and which were far too modest to be of any real heroic value to Karou—could still wreak a satisfying morsel of revenge.
She’d told her about Karou’s most excellent torment of Kaz, and had her and Mik both in helpless laughter describing the sight of his nude Adonis body doing a spastic itch-dance on the model stand. But it was the companion piece to that revenge—Svetla’s ever-grow eyebrows—that had been Eliza’s inspiration.
She’d kissed the shing like lucky dice before pronouncing, “I wish that the hair just between Morgan Toth’s nose and upper lip will grow in at a rate of an inch per hour, beginning now, ending one month from now.”
There was always that moment of wondering if your wish exceeded the medallion’s power, but the shing vanished with her last syllable.
“You do realize,” Mik had said, “that you just described a Hitler mustache?”
By the glint in her eye, they gathered that she did. The revenge was not complete, however, if the subject didn’t know who was responsible, so she’d sent, to his work e-mail, a picture of herself, finger raised to her lip like a mustache. Subject line: Enjoy.
“We have to do that to Esther, too,” Zuzana had declared. “Right now.”
So they did, and began their journey in the best of all possible ways: imagining, in solidarity, the bewildered horror of their enemies.
A long flight, some shopping for cold-weather gear and supplies, a long drive, a long hike—in the snow; damn, it was winter in the Southern Hemisphere—and they were there. Near enough to the portal to contemplate a couple of gavriels for flight. They almost did it, too, but it had become a matter of honor by this point, to preserve them, so Mik said, “Let’s just see what’s on the other side before we decide. Eliza can carry us.”
She did, and that was how they found out what no one in all of Eretz knew:
Where stormhunters nested.
And what none could have guessed:
They liked music.
And it was official: Mik’s three fairy-tale tasks were accomplished. And the ring burning a hole in his pocket? The one that had seemed so crude in the light of the Royal Suite’s shining marble bathroom?
It happened to look just perfect on stormhunter-back, with a northerly sea rolling beneath them, dotted with icebergs and breaching sea creatures that were not in any way whales. He couldn’t go down on one knee without risk of falling off, but that was entirely okay, under the circumstances. “Will you marry me?” he asked.
The answer was yes.
“Am I glad to see you,” Zuzana cried now, crowing at the sight of Liraz and Ziri. Ziri! Not the White Wolf, but Ziri! Oh. That meant he must have… But it was okay, wasn’t it, because here he was in Kirin form again, and he looked pretty nearly exactly the same as he had in his natural flesh. He was smiling broadly, so very handsome, and Liraz at his side was smiling broadly, too, and beautiful, laughing in unbridled amazement, laughing. Laughing like a person who laughs. Liraz.
That seemed almost more amazing than showing up on a freaking stormhunter. But wasn’t.
Because nothing was as amazing as that.
“Can you tell them,” Zuzana asked Eliza, after the initial jag of laughing and exclaiming in mutually non-understandable languages had begun to subside, “that we can’t find the caves?”
Eliza spoke Seraphic, which was handy, but also mildly irritating, as it undercut any sound argument Zuzana might have made for spending a wish to acquire an Eretz language herself. It would have been Chimaera, though, because come on.
“We’ll just have to learn that, too,” Mik had said with a sigh that didn’t fool her for a second. “Resurrection and invisibility and fighting and now non-human languages, too? What is this, school?”
But Eliza wasn’t translating, and Zuzana realized she was staring at Ziri agog. Oh! Right. His body. She’d seen his body at the pit. That was going to take some explaining. “It’s him,” Zuzana confirmed. “We’ll tell you later.”
And so translations were given—to Liraz, who in turn translated to Ziri in Chimaera—and then they were guiding them back south, asking things like where they’d come from and whether the stormhunter had a name, and when Zuzana spotted the crescent, she realized a flaw in her grand vision of sweeping in and bowling everyone over with amazement and tornado-force wingbeats.
The stormhunter—who did not have a name—wasn’t going to fit through the crescent. Well, damn.
She had to put a halt to small talk and make herself understood. “We need an audience. This needs to be witnessed, and spoken of far and wide. Sung. I want songs to be written about this. Do you mind? Could you go get everyone? And Karou?”
At which point Ziri and Liraz both got all bashful and weird, and Mik suggested, delicately, that perhaps Karou and Akiva were… busy.
Collision of emotions! Thrill at the thought that at last Karou and Akiva were “busy”! And injustice, that it should coincide with her own moment of glory. “We can interrupt them for this, though, right?” she begged. They were coasting in circles now, forestalling the moment they would have to disembark and enter the caves on foot.
“No,” spake Mik, voice of sanity.
“But—”
“No.”
“Fine. But I want someone to see us.”
Everyone saw them. Liraz went to fetch them, and they crowded into the crescent, and there were gratifying gasps and shouts. Zuzana heard Virko’s affectionate bellow of “Neek-neek!” and then felt, finally, that it was okay to bring this ride to an end.
They brought the huge creature as close as they could to the rock face and jump-scrambled from its back, hugging its vast neck first in thanks and farewell. They supposed it would go now and leave them, but hoped that it wouldn’t (“If it doesn’t, we’re naming it.”), and they paused to watch, wistful, as it rose higher and higher until it was just a shape cut from the glittering vault of the sky.
Only then, turning toward the gathered chimaera and seraphim, did they realize that something was wrong. There was a pall over their manner, and… Karou was there. Not busy. Why not? And why was she standing way back there? And where was Akiva?
Karou gave them a wave, and a brief marveling smile and head shake, and her eyes popped at the sight of Eliza’s wings, of course, but even that didn’t draw her forward to greet them. She was talking to Liraz, and Liraz was no longer laughing like a person who laughs. She was back to her most terrible self. Tight-lipped and white-nostrilled with ire, more savage than ever the White Wolf had looked.
Zuzana forgot all her glory and rushed to her friend. “What? What what what? God, Karou, what?”
“Akiva.” So lost. Karou looked so lost. That wasn’t how she was supposed to look. “He’s gone.”
82
ABERRATION
—There is a reason—
(“What have I done?”)
—There is a reason for the tithe.
This wasn’t speech. What Nightingale conveyed to Akiva, she did so in silence, in sending, and it was more than words. It was memory opened to him, in sound and image, and emotion unfolded for him, in horror and heartache. It was not possible to misunderstand. He stood before Nightingale and Scarab and outwardly he saw them, and the other three behind them. But inwardly, he experienced something else, and shrank from it.
—Be calm. You are my child’s child.
Festival. Nightingale gave her to Akiva in a memory so saturated with yearning that he understood, for its duration, what he himself could have no context for: a parent’s love for a lost child.
—I wish to know you. To help you, and not to hurt you. And so you must listen to me. You are my child’s child, but I never knew of you. Festival was lost to us. Vanished. Only because you exist do I know what became of her. I know that my beloved daughter was a concubine in the harem of a warmonger who tore half a world apart.
She didn’t disguise the desolation this caused her, and Akiva felt himself to be the root of it, as though time worked backward, and he had caused his mother to make the choice that would create him.
—I also know that this could not have befallen her… against her will. She was Stelian, and mine. She was strong. And so she must have chosen this.
The memories were as seamless as though they were Akiva’s own. Running beneath the surface of Nightingale’s words: a pure distillation of the woman who had been Festival, beautiful and troubled. Troubled? By a dowser’s sense for the veins of fate, and a compulsion to follow them, even into the dark.
—And so. And so she must have had a reason.
From Nightingale’s mind to Akiva’s passed the understanding that for many Stelians, fate was as real as love or fear—a dimension of their life with weight enough to shape it. It was called ananke, this sensitivity to the pull of destiny. If your ananke was strong, well then, you could follow or resist, but with resistance came an oppressive sense of wrongness that would haunt your every choice.
—And the reason must be you.
The memories evanesced, leaving a void, and Akiva bereft in it.
You, you, echoing in the emptiness, and finding other words there, waiting. “My son will not be tangled in your feeble fates.” But before he could begin to process this, a new sending bloomed in the space where Festival had been. It was very different: cold, and remote, and immense.
—The Continuum that is the great All is bound and bounded by energies. We call them veils. They have other names, many, but this is the simplest. They are beyond our compass. They are the first and nest of all things, and this we know: The veils hold the worlds intact, and they hold them distinct. Touching, but separate, as the worlds are meant to be. When you pass through a portal, you’re transgressing a cut in a veil.
Veils, the Continuum, the great All. These were not terms that Akiva had heard, but he was gifted an idea of them, and there was reverence in it bordering on worship. It wasn’t a picture or a memory, because that was impossible. No one can have seen the Continuum. It was everything. The sum of the worlds.
Until now, Akiva had known of two: Eretz and Earth. In Nightingale’s sending, he understood… many.
It was dizzying. What he glimpsed in the idea of the Continuum was enough to make him want to fall to his knees. He beheld space, all around him and peeling open. And open, and open, no end to its opening, no limit to its dimensions. Like a god rearing its thousand-thousand heads, one after another after another after another, opening its thousand-thousand mouths to loose a tremendous, world-echoing roar—
—We draw energy from the veils to make magic. They are the source. Of everything. It is no simple matter. Power can’t just be taken. There is a price, a trade of energies. This is the tithe.
“The pain tithe,” Akiva said. He spoke it, not knowing how to communicate in kind, and saw Scarab’s brows knit, while Nightingale’s, which had been knit, fell smooth. She regarded him curiously, and her reply imparted gentle pity.
—Pain is one way. The easiest and crudest. The pain tithe is… using a plow to pluck a flower. Is it all you know?
He nodded. It was unnerving, this speaking without speaking.
“Not all,” objected Scarab, aloud. “Or we wouldn’t be here.”
The way she looked at him, the blame. Akiva began to understand. “Sirithar,” he said, hoarse.
Scarab’s look sharpened. “So you do know.”
“I know nothing.” He said it bitterly, feeling it more keenly than he ever had before.
Sensing his distress, Nightingale came forward. She didn’t reach for him but he felt, as he had once before, a cool touch at his brow, and knew it had been she who had prevented him from drawing power in the battle of the Adelphas, and who had, so briefly, soothed him after. In the next instant, he knew something else, and it staggered him: The enigma of the victory in the Adelphas. It had been them, of course.
These five angels had somehow turned the tide against four thousand Dominion. Many times over the past years, Akiva had tried to imagine the magic of his kin, but he had never guessed at such might as this.
Nightingale spoke now aloud, putting no more into his mind, and Akiva was glad of it, especially when he heard what more it was she had to say.
No cool touch could mitigate this.
“ ‘Sirithar’ is the energy itself, the raw substance of the veils. It is… the shell of the egg, and the yolk, too. It protects and it nourishes. It gives form to space and time, and without it there could be only chaos. You asked what it is you’ve done. You have taken sirithar.” She sounded sad. “So much at once that to tithe for it would have killed you hundreds of times over, but it didn’t, because you didn’t tithe. Child of my child, you gave nothing, only took. It shouldn’t be possible, and this is a very grave thing. What Scarab said is true. We tracked you here to kill you—”
“Before you could kill everyone.” This from Scarab. No gentleness from her. It didn’t matter.
Akiva was shaking his head. Not in denial. He believed them. He felt the truth of it, and the answer to the question that had been gnawing at him. But he still didn’t understand. “I know nothing,” he said again. “How could I kill—?” Everyone.